‘If I can make it there, / I’ll make it anywhere, / It’s up to you, New York, New York.”

With lyrics by Fred Ebb and a melody by John Kander, this standard—the theme song of Martin Scorsese’s 1977 movie, New York, New York—catches a truth about the city, that it’s a character in itself, a skyscraping sentience holding its own set of scales. Sophisticated and complicated. Overwhelming and romantic. Beguilingly intimate and stunningly cold. This megalomaniacal muse eats dreams for breakfast.

In January, the staff of Vanity Fair assumed new quarters, at One World Trade Center. In a nod to this move downtown, the magazine’s editors—guided by contributors Laura Jacobs and James Wolcott—decided to identify favorite films that epitomize Manhattan. The result is a list of 100 cinematic treasures, along with a handful of outer-borough standouts. Ours, however, is a city of ambition—of “Bests”—and with this in mind, we winnowed the list to 10 movies that, above all others, are definitive, each expressing a facet of magnetic and mythic New York, the city as it lives in our hopes and nightmares. The first slice of Big Apple pie is set in the Depression, backstage on 42nd Street, where the reach for stardom has its most rousing incarnation. Interestingly, the ‘21’ Club, a restaurant that was originally a speakeasy in Greenwich Village and then settled at 21 West 52nd Street in 1929, appears or is mentioned in four of these films. In N.Y., N.Y., if you can make good, make a name, make a killing, even just make the rent, you’re a member of the club in good standing.

Ahead, in chronological order: the 10 best movies about Manhattan, as chosen by V.F.’s editors.

42nd Street (1933)

‘You’ve got to go on and you’ve got to give and give and give,” says the big-time director (Warner Baxter) to the untried chorus girl (Ruby Keeler). Then comes the clincher, a line bronzed like baby shoes: “You’re going out a youngster but you’ve got to come back a star!” If there’s a foundational New York City mythology, it’s this one: today’s unknown is tomorrow’s headliner. Indeed, the city’s economy depends upon it. 42nd Street is set in 1932 and everybody’s broke, just trying to keep the lights on. Energy is everything, and there’s never more energy than on “naughty, bawdy, gaudy, sporty Forty-second Street.” The rhythms are syncopated, the cinematography’s pearlescent, and Busby Berkeley’s human kaleidoscopes, looming perspectives, and pre-Code love of legs make for musical numbers of crazy invention. The drumming finale suggests the heartbeat of a city in which everyone’s dancing as fast as they can.

All About Eve (1950)

‘We’re all busy little bees,” says Margo Channing, the flamboyant actress reportedly based on Tallulah Bankhead and played brilliantly by Bette Davis, “full of stings, making honey day and night. Aren’t we, honey?” If 42nd Street is the touchstone, All About Eve is the inner sanctum. The thea-tah, dahling, is dialogue, and for sheer wit and love of language Joseph Mankiewicz’s script has no match. Almost every line is quotable and many are immortal (“Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night”). From the early scene in Margo’s dressing room to the last scene’s prismatic hall of mirrors, this cold, dry gin martini of a movie plays out in knowing glances, droll wisdom, and flashing repartee. As Eve Harrington, the plotting novice who wants what Margo’s got, Anne Baxter is a show within the show. And has any critic ever been as omniscient as Addison DeWitt, as embodied by George Sanders? It’s for exactly this world that countless “Eves” keep coming to this city.

Rear Window (1954)

A lot of people crowd the tiny island called Manhattan, most of them living in small cages called apartments. Curtains, blinds, and the blind eye suffice for privacy, for when the eyes open there’s almost too much to see. This Hitchcock masterpiece is set in Greenwich Village in the crash pad of photographer L. B. Jefferies—a tetchy James Stewart—who’s laid up with a broken leg. He’s visited nightly by a Park Avenue apparition, his angelically beautiful society girlfriend, Lisa Fremont—Grace Kelly in all her glory. While he recuperates, the rear window of his apartment serves as a form of cinema, framing the narratives of his neighbors. There’s the ballet dancer and her boyfriends, the busybody sunbather, the struggling composer, the spinster “Miss Lonelyhearts,” the newlyweds born of Paddy Chayefsky, and the unhappy couple out of James M. Cain. It’s a microcosm of Manhattan. But where did the bedridden woman go?

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

There is nothing sweet about Sweet Smell of Success because there’s nothing sweet about tabloid journalism’s monster need for fresh meat. This gorgeous, seedy New York nocturne has the look of film noir—blistering streetlights, shadows like shivs—but what usually spills in these corridors of power is information, not blood. “I love this dirty town,” says J. J. Hunsecker, the gossip columnist modeled on Walter Winchell and played by Burt Lancaster, Mephistopheles in a suit. He’s not talking about the ash in the gutters. It’s the dirt, the dish, the scuttlebutt, and the scoop that turn this world of blackmail and exposé. The dialogue by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman has a roughed-up literary rhythm and jazz bite—Damon Runyon with the air let out. “Match me, Sidney,” Hunsecker says, looking for a light from press agent Sidney Falco, a J.J.-in-training, played by Tony Curtis. He’s the sleek and greedy falcon on Hunsecker’s fist, wings sharp, a darkness dropping.

West Side Story (1961)

Famously and scathingly panned by The New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, West Side Story has not only outdistanced her wrath, it transcends all criticism. The 1957 musical upon which the film is based—a spontaneous combustion of genius in excelsis (Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim)—was a critical hit on Broadway. But the film, a sort of Manhattan project co-directed by Robbins and Robert Wise, is something else entirely, an explosive high-concept, high-art hybrid—cinematic, operatic, super-kinetic. Beginning with the silent opening (an aerial tracking shot that glides high over borough rooftops to land in a basketball court full of punks), and on through the Rite of Spring drive and desire of the Bernstein-Robbins numbers, the movie is a sublime orchestration of clashing genres. Symbolic, then, that this postwar update on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was set in Manhattan’s Lincoln Square, the low-rent ‘hood that would soon become Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

It’s a high-fashion fantasy, featuring the long-stemmed Audrey Hepburn, chic in Givenchy; patrician Patricia Neal, sporting Pauline Trigère; and the Adonis who wants to write, George Peppard, looking perfect no matter what he’s wearing. But it’s also true to reality, or, rather, to the retail nature of New York, where the question isn’t always what’s for sale but who. Based on Truman Capote’s acidic novella about a call girl named Holly Golightly, the film version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s softens the story without losing its sense of Manhattan as a city of transactions—checks written and people bought. Standing at the corner of 57th and Fifth, Tiffany & Co. turns in both directions, its vault full of gifts for the mistress as well as those coveted engagement rings. “The quietness and the proud look of it,” says Holly. “Nothing very bad could happen to you there.” Looking for love in all the wrong places, she finally finds it in an alley, in the rain, in New York.

The French Connection (1971)

It’s Christmas in the city and going down is a $500K deal for heroin, shipped from France and worth $32 million on the street. Director William Friedkin’s location shooting is all over the map—Madison Avenue, Fifth Avenue, Little Italy, Brooklyn, Queens, and Randalls and Wards Islands—and much of the movie is seen through store windows and smoky windshields, a glassy sensation of spontaneity that hits the screen with striking bravura. The car chase under the elevated subway track is a jaw-dropping, hair-raising classic, and the stakeout scenes, the teamwork tailing that’s practically balletic, would set the bar for verismo detective work on-screen. As “Popeye” Doyle, Gene Hackman in a porkpie hat works the case as if he’s Sinatra in Vegas. His partner is Roy Scheider, equally dapper (if not more), and when they share the frame it’s a buddy movie. But the end is existential (another French connection?)—the drug bust imperfect and Doyle alone.

Taxi Driver (1976)

If any movie gets the disrupted REM cycle of the city that never sleeps it’s Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. New York in the 70s was pretty scuzzy, and the welcoming committee at the Port Authority bus terminal—pushers, prostitutes, hustlers, and runaways—was no picnic. Add insomnia and you’ve got trouble. A young and wiry Robert De Niro is the aimless, sleepless Travis Bickle, a former marine who’s almost feral, his digs the equivalent of a rathole. Working the night shift in his yellow cab, he’s eye to eye with the curbside underbelly of Manhattan. “All the animals come out at night,” he says, “sick, venal.” Deciding to do something about it, he emerges as a knight-errant with a mohawk cut and an arsenal up his sleeve. A very young Jodie Foster is his damsel in distress. The simmering score by Bernard Hermann runs through the movie like a hot dark river, and the neon signs never stop blinking.

Manhattan (1979)

Woody Allen has filmed more love letters to New York than any director in history, and several of his best—including Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters—could vie for a place on this list of 10. Manhattan, however, is his most concentrated valentine to the city, a quiver of cupid’s arrows hitting target after target: Manhattan’s dizzy narcissism, its endless striving, its surprising loveliness. The movie begins with a view of East Side co-ops seen from the far side of the East River, Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” rising on the soundtrack. In a voice-over, Allen’s character is trying out openings for a novel: “He adored New York City…. To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white … ” And so the film is shot in black and white—the misty, muscular work of cinematographer Gordon Willis. As for the characters that populate the film—the cultural cognoscenti, the intellectuals of the quarterlies, the irresistibly creative and confusing women—they’re in luminous, humorous, ever mysterious shades of gray.

Metropolitan (1990)

There are all kinds of private worlds and secret societies in New York City, cultures and subcultures, circles within circles. Written, produced, and directed by Whit Stillman, Metropolitan zeroes in on “deb week” in December, the Wasp rite of passage in which young society women are presented at coming-out balls. After each dance, this particular group of girls and their handsome escorts retire to one or another’s East Side living room to talk until dawn about ethics, class, literature, and life. On the precipice of adulthood, they’re trying to figure out who or what they are—one character refuses to use the term “preppie,” instead preferring U.H.B., “urban haute bourgeoisie.” The movie is a silver-spoonful of the charmed life these young people have so far enjoyed, yet which some are beginning to see as a trap. Like the kids themselves, Metropolitan floats in a champagne bubble of protection so golden and fragile one holds one’s breath, not wanting it to pop.